Category: Organic certification

The season is turning and our beautiful fruit trees are starting to lose their leaves and go dormant for the winter. Katie and Merv have been out amongst them, counting up how many trees of what variety are a good size to sell and loading the information onto the website ready for sale.

We even have the first of our unique multigrafted trees with up to 4 varieties of fruit on the one tree!! Perfect for people with limited space for growing who want to get the maximum amount of variety in their home-grown-fruit bowl!

If you
want to order one of our organic bare-rooted fruit trees, go to the website
here:

…and
scroll to the bottom of the page to click on the type of fruit tree you’re looking
for.

Orders close June 30,
2019.

We are the only certified organic fruit trees nursery in Australia (that we know of) and since it is also our first year selling our trees, we will also supplement the trees we’ve grown ourselves with wholesale trees from another nursery who also specialise in heritage varieties. When you’re ordering, the trees from our nursery have “(organic)” in the name; the trees we buy from an external nursery do not.

You’ll then be able
to pick-up your trees from the farm on the weekend of July 13 and 14,
between 10 am and 4 pm.

We will also have a Nursery Open Day on Sunday 21 July for a final sale of any trees that weren’t sold in the first round.

Another big announcement is that we finally have a logo for Carr’s Organic Fruit Tree Nursery!! After much deliberation, debate and fine tweaking over co-op morning tea, we decided to go with this logo that has a hand-drawn image of Merv’s grafting knife at the top of it.

We debated whether anyone would know what a grafting knife is, and whether we should just go with some sort of generic image of a tree, like a million other businesses have. In the end we decided that the knife (even if no one knows what it is) really says more about the nursery and its history. Merv has had this knife for 65 years, since he first started studying horticulture at Burnley College as a 17 year old.

The knife has had so much use over the years that the blade has worn down to almost a sliver, but it still gets pulled out and sharpened for budding every February. It represents the knowledge of an old skill that is being passed down from Merv to Katie and me.

The clincher too is that inscribed on the butt of the blade, and still visible, are the words ‘Oil the Joints’. Poignant.

Garlic is an important marker for us Gung Hoes. It was the first crop we ever planted back in April 2015 when Mel and I first started leasing land off Katie and Hugh. It’s one of those optimistic crops. We plant it as the soil is cooling and the days are getting shorter, when the sweat and dust of summer is starting to settle and we can begin to breathe again. The winter and spring crops are tucked into their new beds (in theory) and we are hopeful for the season to come. The garlic gets planted and mulched and slowly it grows over the next 7 months. We water it and nurture it, take the weeds out so it can grow unimpeded. We hope that when we finally pull them up, they will have grown into perfectly pungent and gorgeous heads of garlic but until we pull them up, we don’t really know how its going.

This time last year when we pulled up the garlic, our hope was crushed. We lost almost two-thirds of our crop because of the wet season and what remained had bulb rot which meant that one or two cloves from each head were rotten! We salvaged and sold what we could but it was the first of a number of challenges that made for a very difficult summer for us.

Come April, ever hopeful again we planted our garlic. As usual we nurtured and cared for it for 7 long months. After consulting with our biodynamic expert friend, Janet from Newstead community garden, about the best day by the moon to harvest the garlic, we dug it up 2 weeks ago. The timing couldn’t have been better. The garlic had had almost 2 weeks of dry weather in the ground and for the first time ever, we dug it up on a blue sky day with no impending rain clouds! The game changer though was finally having a weatherproof drying shed to hang the garlic in to cure.

The timing of when to pull your garlic up is crucial. After 7 months of slow growth, there is a window of about 1–2 weeks when it’s ideal to harvest it. If you go too early, the garlic won’t have segmented into cloves; too late and the head begins to open up which means moisture, critters and dirt can get in and the garlic won’t last as long.

This year we nailed it! It is so perfect! Dark purple (thanks to the cool winter and iron-rich soil), perfectly plump and strong! We got it out just before the rain and have been curing it for 2 weeks in our shed, safe from the storms raging outside! That means Mel and Sas can sleep peacefully.

This time of year, every hour out in the patch counts. There’s beds to prepare, compost to add, seedlings to sow and plant and mulch and a small window of opportunity to do it all before its too bloody hot and everything shrivels. Amidst the spring rush, garlic makes us stop. Sit in the shade and shuck for a while. The other lovely thing about garlic is that it brings people together (unless of course you eat too much and then people may give you a bit of space!). After 2 weeks of our garlic curing, it was time to call in friends, put on a simple Gung Hoe feast and get shucking and bunching together. Many hands and all that…

We are so grateful to Deb, Cohen, Cara, Elle, Marty and Amanda for helping us shuck and plait those babies this year. So much laughter, joy and good vibes surrounded the garlic as we bunched it up. Hopefully that is infused into the food that gets made with it…

Our garlic crop also symbolises our own cycle of growing and learning as farmers. Each year we save the cream of our crop to be the next year’s seed garlic. We pick the biggest and most beautiful heads to plant, and over the years we’ve seen the consistency, hardiness and quality of our garlic improve as it adapts to our specific situation and we learn better how to care for it.

It will be available for pick up from the Harcourt Organic Farming Co-op shop on Wednesday 12th and 19th December from 9am to 1pm or from the Wesley Hill Market in Castlemaine on Saturday the 22 December. We can also post garlic around Australia too but not to Tassie or W.A.

Katie in front of what’s going to become the Harcourt heritage fruit tree nursery

As an orchard kid I grew up familiar with the concept of grafting – I knew that all the fruit trees in the orchard had been grafted, but until I decided to take up the orchard business almost 20 years ago I had no idea how, or why. Nor did I realise that grafting has been around for literally thousands of years – in fact it’s one of the oldest horticultural practices known.

Since coming home to the farm I’ve had the chance to learn these truly ancient skills from my Dad. He’s been growing his own trees for the orchard, as well as “top-working” (changing varieties of mature trees in the orchard) for the last 60 years, so it’s been a fantastic chance to learn from a master grafter.

Hugh and I have been steadily planting, replanting and improving the orchard since we came home, and have put in literally thousands of fruit trees in that time – all of which have been grown in our on-farm nursery. It’s saved us thousands of dollars, allowed us to continuously improve the orchards, and given us the chance to learn and practise all the skills needed to grow our own rootstocks and graft the varieties we’ve needed, which we’ve incorporated into our Grow Great Fruit teaching program and workshops.

Now the orchards are pretty much all planted, and we’re handing over management of them to Ant next season, so there’s less need for the on-farm nursery. However, we didn’t want to lose it, so Sas and I are starting the Harcourt Heritage Fruit Tree Nursery!

Hang on, aren’t I meant to be retiring from farming? And surely Sas already has enough to do…so why are we starting a whole new business?

Well, over the years we’ve built up a pretty good collection of fruit varieties on the farm – 140 at last count! Of them, we’re pretty familiar with at least 80 (the rest are not fruiting yet so we don’t know them), which means we can provide pretty reliable info about them: how they do in this climate, reliable harvest dates, etc.

We’re also growing our own rootstocks from seed and cutting; this not only makes it a very low-risk and low-capital business to get off the ground, but also means the trees we’re growing from scratch are more likely to suit this climate because they’ve been grown here.

But the main reason both Sas and I decided to start a nursery is because we love growing trees, and we just couldn’t resist the opportunity to learn the nursery business from Dad, while he’s still active and interested enough to teach us!

We’re both passionate about learning the many and varied skills you need to produce healthy, vigorous organic trees, so a big part of the appeal for us is that Merv will be here to teach us everything, and oversee the whole operation.

A successful bud on one of our experimental citrus trees

He’s also trying new stuff all the time, which he’s passing on to us. The latest experiment has been trying to grow our own citrus rootstocks, and learning how to graft citrus trees.

Being evergreen, they’re completely different from deciduous trees, so it’s been lots of fun being a bit experimental. And so far, it seems to be working!

Another big appeal is that we know we’ll be helping to preserve some of the older heritage varieties that are hard to buy and in danger of disappearing in favour of the more modern and well-known varieties.

The very first trees are available for sale now – here’s the link to see what we’ve got (anything with MAFG or MAFGS after the name is out of our nursery) but we’ve only taken baby steps so far so there’s not many. For this year at least we’ve continued to source trees from a commercial wholesale nursery as usual, but by next year we hope to massively increase our offering, and have achieved organic certification.